A mirror will never tell you if you're positively beautiful, that knowledge comes from within!

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Tag Archive | Self love

I am so blessed to have had my experiences in life. I thank god that I don’t look like what I been through. There is alot about me that I keep to myself. I’m starting to learn that my past has value. If my words can stop another person from going through the pain that I have gone through then I need to take the key and unlock the vault that I hide all the bad stuff in. Like I stated in a post in the past I could have easily been that young woman in Texas who was killed by her lover. he blamed his rage on her positive diagnosis. People fail to do the research on transmission from woman to man so alot of the times women are hurt out of ignorance and fear of something that is a slim possibility to begin with. when you think about sex I can honestly say I have been there done that. I didn’t care about myself for a minute. I let others tell me what I should do and even when I insisted on condoms I wasn’t strong enough to enforce my wishes. At my lowest point I was one of those women who allowed a man to control my body and and my finances. For 2 months I rejected my own intelligence. I allowed him to dress me up and take pictures of me and sell me on the internet. All because he looked at me and said I was beautiful and that he loved me. I now look at that sad little girl that I use to be and I know what her issue was. She had to learn to love her self. She had to see her own beauty. She had to wake up and determine her own worth. I never really thought he loved me. I never really believed him when he called me beautiful. I was just a soul-less shell of a body aimlessly wondering the earth waiting to live. I can now say I’m proud to have had the experiences that he gave me. One day I just packed my stuff, got in my car and drove away. He called me asking me to come back promising it would be different. He had his other girls calling me trying to talk me into coming back but God made it easy for me to leave with no harm and no trouble the first time. I was not going to fall into the same hole a second time.

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Lynnea April Garbutt was born in Los Angeles California. She found out about her HIV status at the age of 7. For as long as she could remember she has had dreams of being a model. The older she got the more she saw her dream fading away. She felt that no one would consider her to be beautiful because of all the hurtful things she heard said about HIV positive people. At the age of 20 she realized that no matter what people said she was still beautiful and HIV was never a part of her appearance. Lynnea wanted to spread the message that HIV could happen to anyone, and they would still be beautiful. In 2006 Lynnea, age 21, lived her dream of being a model by enlisting the help of a friend and The National Association of People With AIDS also known as NAPWA. The Positively Beautiful Fashion Show came to life during the Positive Youth Institute at The Ryan White National Youth Conference.
Lynnea, who is now 30 years old, still feels passionate about inspiring other positive people to recognize their own beauty while proving to the world that HIV has no look.
In May of 2014 Lynnea found out that another seemingly impossible dream of hers would soon come true. She grew up believing that motherhood would never be apart of her story. In November she gave birth to her beautiful HIV negative baby girl. Lynnea now knows that it is her calling to continue to educate the world about HIV/AIDS and what a positive life entails. She has experienced stigma and ignorance as well as amazing love and support. Lynnea has a story to tell and it is Positively Beautiful!